A Note ON ALCOVES
IT is surprising what protean gifts a theme develops once you attempt to grapple with it. When I was asked to set down on paper my personal no¬tions as to The Form and Scope of the Novel, the affair seemed simple. But, with the task actually begun, the type¬writer bell may hardly tinkle thrice before one sees that the guide to fur¬ther composition must be the once celebrated chapter, in I forget whose Natural History, upon the snakes of Iceland. It read, as you recall, "There are no snakes in Iceland." For one perceives that the form and scope of the novel, if not similarly non-ex¬istent, at least stay indeterminable in lands wherein the form and the scope of prose fiction stay limitless. The sole aim of the written, printed and formally labeled novel is, I take it, to divert. Such is (one may assume with in any event quite reputable backing) the only aim of creative writing, and of all the arts. But much the same sort of diversion seems to be the purpose of a staggering number of human endeavors: and it is when one considers the novels which are not formally labeled, that the theme eva¬sively assumes all manner of shapes, and the field of prose "fiction is re¬vealed as limitless. I do not hunt paradox. I but wish in real sincerity to acknowledge that our trade of novel writing and pub¬lishing is an ineffably minor evince¬ment of the vast and pride-evoking truth, that human beings are wiser than reason. Pure reason—I mean, as pure as human reason assays—re¬veals out of hand that the main course of daily living is part boredom, part active discomfort and fret, and, for the not inconsiderable rest, a blunder¬ing adherence to some standard de¬rived from this or that hearsay. But human beings, in this one abnegation infinitely wise, here all discard the use of their reasoning powers, which are perhaps felt here to be at least as gullible as usual: and brave men cheerily deny their immersion in the futile muddle through which they toil lip-deep. Pinned to the wall, the more truthful of flesh and blood may grant that this current afternoon does, by the merest coincidence, prove an¬swerable to some such morbid and over-colored description by people bent on being "queer": but in the ad¬mitter's mind forgetfulness is already about its charitable censorship of the events of the morning, to the intent that this amended account be placed on file with many expurgated editions of yesterday and the most brilliant romances about tomorrow. For hu¬man memory and human optimism are adepts at the prevarications which everybody grasps, retails and tire¬lessly reiterates; these two it is who coin the fictions which every person weaves into the interminable extrava¬ganza that he recites to himself as an accurate summing up of his own past and future; and everywhere about this earth's revolving surface moves a circulating library of unwritten novels bound in flesh and haber¬dashery. Now the wholesome effect of these novels is patent. It is thanks to this brace of indefatigable romancers that nobody really needs to notice how the most of us, in unimportant fact, ap proach toward death through gray and monotonous corridors. Besides, one finds a number of colorful alcoves here and there, to be opened by in toxication or venery, by surrender to the invigorating lunacy of herd action, or even by mental concentration upon new dance-steps and the problems of auction bridge. One blunders, indeed, into a rather handsome number of such alcoves which, when entered, temporarily shut out the rigidity and the only exit of the inescapable cor ridor. And in addition, as we go, all sorts of merry tales are being inter¬changed about what lies beyond the nearing door and the undertaker's lit¬tle black bag. These are not, though, the only anesthetics. The human maker of fiction furnishes yet other alcoves, whether with beautiful or shocking ideas, with many fancy-clutching toys that may divert the traveler's mind from dwelling on the tedium of his journey and the ambiguity of its end. I have not yet, of course, come to con¬sideration of the formally labeled novel, for this much is true of every form of man-made fiction, whether it be concocted by poets or statesmen, by bishops in "conclave or by adver¬tisers in the back of magazines. And since memory and optimism, as has been said, are the archetypal Homer and St. John, the supreme and most altruistic of all deceivers, the omnipo¬tent and undying masters of omni¬present fictive creation, their "meth- ods" are in the main pursued by the great pair's epigoni; who likewise tend to deal with the large deeds of superhuman persons seen through a glow of amber lucency, not wholly un¬akin to that of maple syrup. Of the romances which make for business prosperity and religious re¬vivals and wars to end war forever, here is no call to speak. Nor need I here point out that well-nigh every one who anywhere writes prose today, whether it takes the form of a tax re¬turn, or a magazine story, or a letter beginning "My dear So-and-So," is consciously composing fiction: and in the spoken prose of schoolrooms and courts of law and social converse, I think, no candid person will deny that expediency and invention collaborate. It may be true that lies have short legs, but civilization advances upon them. So do we all exist, as if in a warm grateful bath, submerged and soothed by fiction. In contrast to the inhabi tants of the Scilly Islands, who are re¬puted to have lived by taking in one another's washing, so do we live by interchanging tales that will not wash. There seems to be no bound, no fron¬tier trading-post, appointed anywhere to this barter of current fiction, not in the future nor in the years behind. Men have been, almost cynically, shown with what ease the romance which we call history may be recast throughout, now that America re¬joices in a past which has all been painstakingly rewritten with more care of the King's English, and where¬in the War of the Revolution takes its proper place as the latest addition to the list of German outrages. Our newspapers continue the war-time economizing of intelligence, and still serve patriotic substitutes in serials, wherein Red and Yellow and Black perils keep colorful the outlook, and fiends oppose broad-minded seraphim •in every political matter, and Messrs. Levine and Trotsky emulate the apostle by dying daily. Our clergy are no less prolific in their more fu¬turistic school of art, and on every Sabbath morning discourse engagingly of paradise and of that millennium of which the advent is somehow being brought nearer, one gathers, by the more energetic of our prelates taking notes and whisky in the larger res¬taurants. The past, the present and the future are thus everywhere pre¬sented in the terms of generally pleas¬ure-giving prose fictions: and life is rendered passable by our believing in those which are most to our especial liking. Well, it is the task of the novelist—I mean, at last, the novelist who is frankly listed as such in Who's Who —to aid according to his abilities in this old world-wide effort, so to de¬lude mankind that nobody from birth to death need ever really bother about his, upon the whole, unpromising sit¬uation in the flesh. It is the sole aim of the novelist, alike in art and com merce, to divert us from unprofitable and rational worrying, to head yet one more desperate sally from that ordered living and the selves of which we are tired. So I suspect there must always be, to the last digit, precisely as many "methods" as there are novelists. For the business of the novelist is to tell untruths that will be diverting: and of their divertingness he can have no touchstone, before the receipt of roy¬alty statements, save only the re¬sponse which these untruths evoke from him. His primary endeavor must, for this reason, be to divert, not any possible reader, but himself. Some tale-tellers find themselves most readily bedrugged by yearning toward loveliness unknown and unat¬tainable : these are, we say, our ro¬manticists. To them are, technically, opposed the Pollyannas among fiction writers, who can derive a sort of ob¬scure esthetic comfort from consid¬ering persons even less pleasantly sit- uated than themselves—somewhat as a cabin passenger on a sinking ship might consider the poor devils in the steerage—and so write "realism." But the inspiring principle remains un¬changed: you think of that which is above or below you in order to avoid thinking of what is about you. So it really does not greatly matter whether you travel with Marco Polo to Cathay or with the Kennicotts to Gopher Prairie. The excursion may be for the purpose of looking at beautiful things wistfully or at ugly things contemptu¬ously : the point is that it is an excur¬sion from the place where you regard over-familiar things with a yawn. When one considers these truisms— and fails to see why anybody not in the act of writing for the more suc¬cessful periodicals need dispute them —the form and scope of even the for¬mally labeled novel seem fluctuating and indeterminable. The novelist, it is apparent, will write in the form— with such dramatic, epic or lyric lean- ings as his taste dictates—which he personally finds alluring: his rhythms will be such as caress his personal pair of ears: and the scope of his writ¬ing will be settled solely by what he personally does or does not find inter¬esting. For the serious prose crafts¬man will write primarily to divert himself—with a part thrifty but in the main a philanthropic underthought of handing on, at a fair price, the play¬things and the games which he con¬trives, for the diversion of those with a like taste in anodynes. And to do this will content him. For he will be¬lieve that he may win to fame by brewing oblivion, he will hope to in¬vent, if he be very lucky, some quite new form of "let's pretend." But he will not believe that anybody with a valid claim to be considered a post¬graduate child can gravely talk about affixing limits to the form and scope of that especial pastime.